1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to mail processing equipment and is concerned more particularly with a method and apparatus for extracting the contents of envelopes.
Opening of envelopes and extraction and handling of their contents represents a significant labour cost for credit card companies, utilities and other organizations that receive large volumes of mail. For example, a credit card company or the like may receive tens of thousands of envelopes each day. Evenly envelope must be opened and its contents must be extracted, checked, sorted and processed. Many of the envelopes will contain an invoice or remittance advice and cheque for the amount of the invoice. However, in other cases, one or other of these items will be missing or there will be a discrepancy between the invoice amount and the cheque while in other cases correspondence will be included.
An analysis by the Bank Administration Institute in 1968 identified eight different categories into which incoming mail would be sorted in a typical remittance processing operation. That study showed that the average processing time for each piece of mail was 9.98 seconds after the envelope had been opened and that 5.88 seconds of this time was required to obtain the envelope and remove its contents. This corresponds to processing of only 361 items per hour for each operator.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Automatic equipment is available for opening envelopes. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,301,116 and 3,952,874 both issued to Trevor W. Owen disclose mail processing equipment for this purpose. Equipment manufactured under U.S. Pat. No. 3,301,116 is commercially available under the trade mark TRI-CUT from Bell & Howell Inc. of Chicago, Ill. The TRI-CUT 3-WAY LETTEROPENER opens each envelope along the bottom longitudinal edge and each end edge. Opened envelopes are delivered to an operator in batches from the TRI-CUT 3-WAY LETTEROPENER but the operator must still separate the contents from the front and rear sheets that made up the envelope.
In a remittance processing operation, the contents of the envelope will typically comprise two relatively thin sheets, namely a cheque and a remittance advice or invoice as discussed previously. In practice, there is a natural tendency for these items to cling to the front and read sheets that made up the envelope and in some cases the remittance advice and cheque may even be trapped in the unopened edge that was at the top of the envelope. These factors make it awkward for the operator to remove the contents from the envelope and to some extent account for the large amount of the overall processing time that is occupied by removal of the contents of the envelope. It is also at least partly because of these difficulties that contents extraction from envelopes is generally performed by hand.
An object of the present invention is to provide a method of extracting the contents of envelopes which can be operated on a batch system to simultaneously extract the contents of a relatively large number of envelopes as an aid to speeding mail processing. Another object is to provide an apparatus for use in performing the method.